Recent advances in genetic engineering have provided the requisite tools to transform plants to contain foreign genes. It is now possible to produce plants which have unique characteristics of agronomic and crop processing importance. The ability to chose the tissues in which to express such foreign genes and the time during plant growth to obtain expression is possible through the choice of a regulatory sequence which turns on the gene, called the promoter. A wide range of promoters are known for various plants, plant tissues, and developmental stages.
The tomato is a very important plant for genetic engineering. It is readily transformed to express foreign genes and has many characteristics which are known to be improved by certain genes. It is also a valuable crop plant in many countries and was the first transgenic food crop approved for sale in the U.S.
Promoters useful in expressing foreign genes in tomato and other fruits are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,943,674 (Houck et al., Jul. 24, 1990, incorporated herein by reference) discloses the 2A11 promoter as useful in expression of a heterologous gene in tomato fruit. The E4 and E8 promoters (Deikman, et al. (1988) The EMBO Journal 7:3315-3320), as well as the promoter for polygalacturonase are known to be fruit specific. However, there is a need for additional strong promoters which will cause expression of a gene in tomato fruit, particularly those having varying expression patterns through the growth and maturity of the fruit.
It is an object of the present invention to provide promoters which will function as fruit-specific in tomatoes. It is a still further object of the present invention to provide tomato plant cells and plants containing these promoters and genes encoding desired proteins or antisense sequences for down-regulating proteins or sense expression for co-suppression of protein production.